CNN, Fox News botch Obamacare ruling

In the Twitter version of Dewey defeating Truman, CNN was the first to report the Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday on the Affordable Healthcare Act, only to report the exact opposite of what had actually happened.

CNN reported on its breaking news Twitter feed, seconds after the 10 a.m. ruling was issued, that the individual mandate at the heart of Obamacare had been overturned.

It turned out, though, that the folks at CNN had only read the first page of the ruling. Had they read further, they would have gotten to the point where the majority wrote that the mandate WAS constitutional as a tax, and that — as other media outlets reported almost immediately — the act was in fact held up by the court.

The home page of CNN.com had a banner headline telling readers the mandate had been struck down, and anchor Wolf Blitzer ran on the air with reports from a CNN reporter and producer in the field that the mandate had been overturned.

As the New York Times points out, it wasn’t until more than five minutes later that CNN backed off that reporting and said on the air and online only that the court was considering the measure.

Several minutes after that, they fully reversed course and reported the mandate and the rest of the law had been upheld.

Fox News wasn’t much better, initially reporting in its live TV broadcast that the mandate had been overturned, only to quickly backtrack.

The botched breaking news coverage caused a frenzy on Twitter as news outlets reported the news and users throughout the country hammered CNN for its mistake: